Bryon leapt on her again. One side of his face was obscured by a mask of blood, where the stone must had cut him as he went down. His eyes had a milky shine in the scant moonlight, with red and swollen lids from the pepper spray. They looked like a demon’s eyes. One of his shoulders was bunched up higher than the other as if it had been dislocated. He pinned her down with his knees and dealt three blows to her face with his good arm. One of her molars flew from her mouth with the second blow, and her nose crunched under his hard knuckles on the third.
Three more hits to the head. You won’t be able to take much more of this.
“You’re a crafty little cunt, but I’m still ready for you, Aster. Hard as a fucking hammer. Can you believe it?”
Aster’s face throbbed like a giant aching tooth, and one of her eyes was beginning to swell shut. Blood dripped down her throat from her bleeding nose, and she was dizzy from the repeated blows to the head, but she reached up and grabbed his shirt and pulled him down to her face so she could look directly into his eyes.
“Bryon, listen to me. I know you’re in there and that you can hear me. You’ve been poisoned by my aunt, who wanted to use you and Ruby to get to me. Please, hear me. I love you. Don’t do this.” She reached up and kissed him as deeply as she could, despite the pain that shot through her head from her broken nose. Maybe she could break through the cloud of madness that had infected his brain with her love. Please let it be so. I love you, Bryon. Please hear me.
He softened against her, and they continued to kiss. Her pain was forgotten as she threw as much of herself into him as she could. She remembered their night under the stars and how tender and sweet he’d been.
Come back to me.
He pulled back and Aster was relieved to see the madness in his eyes had faded, leaving behind bemused pain. Then he saw her face, which must have looked like a badly damaged melon, and he gasped. “Oh…oh my god. What happened to me? What…what have I done?” He jumped back from her, wincing as he tried to move his bad shoulder. “There’s something in my h-head, Aster! Make it stop!” He wrapped his good arm around his head and crouched down, his body shaking with sobs.
Aster reeled back again, gripped with dizziness. When she thought she could see straight again, she touched his shoulder. “Bryon, it’s okay. We can fix this.”
He reared up like a feral dog. “Don’t touch me! You did this to me! I can’t believe I ever—.” In his raving, he leaned back a little too far and grabbed onto the railing, but it turned traitor again, this time snapping in two. Bryon struggled to maintain his footing and cried out. “Aster, help!” Then he tumbled backward a second time.
Aster sprung forward to grab his shirt, but it pulled away in her slippery fingers.
He didn’t fall as far this time, but she heard his head hit the stone stairs with a sickening crunch, and his body flipped over once. He didn’t stir again after that.
“Bryon!”
When she reached him, she found his head turned at an impossible angle. His eyes were still open, and a pool of blood was spreading around his broken head. Cradling him in her arms, she rocked him back and forth while pressing as much healing energy into him as she could, crying out the incantations with a hoarse voice. But the magic only bounced off him.
“Let me fix him let me fix him let me fix him,” she muttered over and over, pressing her hands against his head and starting the incantations over again. But she couldn’t connect her spirit to his. He had passed on to wherever the people of this world go, and right then all she wanted to do was follow him.
Her howls of grief and agony filled the night, but the moon only stared back, its half-concealed face as impartial as the stone now drinking Bryon’s blood.
-25-
Something had kicked up Oleander’s dust, but she couldn’t figure out just what. She knotted her hands into pudgy brown fists as she paced back and forth in the privacy of her bedroom. “The pink-haired bitch. It’s always that harlot, is it not?”
It all started this afternoon when that bullying peacekeeper knocked on the door to tell her he’d dropped Aster off at this Mama Iris’s house. This had been an unexpected development. Who the hell was this woman who shared a common Stargazer name? It tickled at the back of her mind, just as something familiar about this peacekeeper kept hitting her as well, but nothing was coming forth and this infuriated her beyond measure.
It was obvious that the sheriff and Ivy had been friends, but she could tell by the concerned wrinkle between his bushy eyebrows, and the way he kept throwing glances over his shoulder as he walked back toward his car, that he’d sniffed something wrong with Oleander as well. She let him leave, but only because she had been so stymied by his presence. If she’d been in the correct mind, one not driven batty by the theatrics and histrionics of the teenage girls she was surrounded with, this Kennedy fellow never would have seen the outside of Oasis house again.
The certainty that something was “off” in Oleander’s universe was making her bones ache. By now the boy should have ingested the potion, sending all of the dominoes falling as Oleander had intended them. But there were too many bad omens. The appearance of the cop and word of a new interloper. And now there was blood on the moon. It seemed almost to be mocking her
A knock sounded at her bedroom door, making jump. “What!”
Ruby poked her head in. She looked even uglier than usual. Probably from worrying about her little girlfriend. “Um, have you heard anything from Aster?”
“Why would she contact me? I should be asking you the same question.”
The other girl’s face grew even paler and Oleander wanted to rake her nails across it just to make it bleed.
“I think I will go try to find her.”
“She might try to kill you if you do find her.”
Ruby gaped. “Why would she do that?”
“If her boyfriend didn’t fare too well tonight and Aster is still alive and well, then she will know you poisoned her. She might be heading this way right now, intent on making you pay. Your poison may have done too well.”
“My—that was yours! And you said it wasn’t a poison!”
Oleander dashed across the room and slapped the girl’s idiot face. She took pleasure in the loud clap of her hard hand across the slack cheek. “I was willing to entertain your little lovesick fantasy insofar as it served my ends, but it just made my life far more complicated. I would kill you right now with my bare hands if it wouldn’t cost me the time it will take to untangle this mess. Now get out of here!”
Oleander slammed the door on the stupid cow’s face and set about getting dressed. She intended to see about this Iris person first, and then finally deal with her wayward niece. But first, she spent some time among her potions and herbs. Oleander never left on an errand without a flask or two in her pocket. Selecting a precious vial from her stores, she headed out the door, ignoring the few girls who were sitting dazed on the couch in front of the TV. She didn’t have to use herbs to sedate them. The endless work in the summer heat had done that all on its own.
She climbed into the Ivy’s car and fastened the safety belt. The last thing she wanted to do was drive this infernal vehicle again, but the trip would be short. The peacekeeper had mentioned the woman’s rough address. The one with the strawberry stand out front, he had said, his suspicious eyes burrowing even deeper when Oleander hadn’t registered immediate recognition of the name or the place. She thought she could find it easily enough, as it was the same road she’d come into town on.
A few minutes later, Oleander spied the strawberry stand in question. It was hard to miss, with its red and green paint, and a sign proclaiming, Strawberries by the Pint and Flat! She pulled into the drive before the house. A lone dim light shone inside the front window, but she couldn’t see anyone moving around in there.
Good. She wanted to catch her by surprise.
Oleander climbed from the vehicle’s cabin. “I’m just going to knock, and we’ll have us a mighty short
conversation.”
She hadn’t taken more than three or four steps when she heard a rustle and hiss. Then something wrapped tight around her ankle, and the flesh began to burn then immediately go numb.
Sickle vines. An Ellemire exclusive, as far as she knew. “That sneaky old cunt.”
Another of the intelligent plants encircled her other ankle, just as her leg was going limp from the paralyzing toxins the vines carried in their thorns. It was a milky substance Oleander had used plenty of in her potion making, namely in poisons, or tonics to treat people with tremor diseases. Sickles were also extremely effective in protecting the perimeter of a property from unwanted guests.
Oleander might have been able to concoct an antidote if she’d brought her bag, but she’d left it at the house, not anticipating something so stealthy. Your arrogance is making you foolish. Lily’s voice. It only popped up when she was at her most vulnerable, and she bristled against it. “Shut up, you bat,” she muttered. She went down in the dry brush that lined the path to Iris’s porch.
“I only just put them out today,” called a raspy voice from just ahead. The figure was nothing more than a silhouette before the doorway, and Oleander could see she was stooped with age, or perhaps the crippled twist of spine caused by the transfer of Old Magic from mother to daughter.
As the old woman moved into the light, Oleander noted the white hair, the cloudy cataracts on her eyes. The delicate chin, and the nose that might once have been dainty before it was ravaged by some sort of wasting disease all showed a twin’s resemblance to Lily, but this woman was fatter and dressed in the dowdy garb of this world.
“I keep ‘em potted in my greenhouse,” said the woman. “Took some seedlings with me when I left Ellemire. It’s always good to take a little bit of home with you wherever you go, don’t ya think?”
She stepped away from the porch and ambled toward Oleander, hands in pockets, not even a trickle of fear on that deeply-lined face. Oleander wondered how one so wasted away could walk without a cane. “I had a feelin’ you’d be stoppin’ by at some point, so I decided to give these little guys some real dirt to play in. Just in case they wanted to say hi. And it looks like they did.”
The paralysis from their venomous bite was spreading through her body. Her legs were useless planks, and her hips were as heavy as a boat anchor, but she could still speak on shallow puffs of breath. “That’s no way to treat… your niece… just came to say… hello…”
Iris cackled. “I like sayin’ hello to you just like this, if you don’t mind.”
“You’d kill me… and have done with it like a… coward?”
“Coward? Now I’m just protectin’ my property like any sensible woman livin’ alone out in the country would. I was gonna ask if you wanted some tea while we waited for Aster, but I guess you’re not in much of a mood for my good hospitality.”
An invisible elephant was sitting on Oleander’s chest, and a deep wheeze was developing, but she still forced out the words. “Tea… Poison…”
“Hissabak!” Iris the old woman whispered, and the sickle vines retreated. She leaned against a nearby tree. The bitch was every bit as confident as Lily, but wilier. “In my readin’ on American psychology, that’s call projection. You only say I’d poison you ‘cause that’s exactly what you’d do. I’m just a simple old tree hugger. Don’t do much these days by way of magic outside my own garden, and that’s only for stuff folks round here like to eat.” She reached into the front pocket of the overalls she was wearing and pulled out a wad of napkin. Out of the other pocket she pulled a roll of silver tape. She smelled something fruity. Oleander didn’t like where this was going.
“What’s … that? Poison…”
Iris stepped closer and loomed over Oleander’s powerless body. Her arms had turned traitor as well, so she couldn’t ward the old woman away.
“Not poison. Medicine. After Aster told me you done stole the body of Miss Ivy—I can only imagine what you did to the real woman, but I didn’t wanna horrify the young girl more than was necessary—I decided to do a little research of my own. That little potion of yours must’ve took you a long time to make.”
She opened the napkin, revealing a big strawberry so red it looked like a ruby out of a king’s crown. Dangling it over Oleander’s mouth, she said, “You’ll be happy—though probably not, now that I think about it—to learn that reversing the potion is a whole heck of a lot simpler. Perfect for an alchemy novice like me, though maybe not as perfect as it would be if you’d made it. But if somethin’ goes wrong, I guess it’s no big loss.”
Oleander tried to pull away as Iris’s wrinkled fingers drew closer, but she might as well have been pushing against a mountain to make it move. All she could manager were a few grunts and mutters.
Her struggles were no match for the old woman, who shoved the berry into her mouth and then quickly strapped it shut with a length silver of tape from the roll. The smell from whatever potion she’d injected into the strawberry filled her nose with its cloying herbal stink.
“Now, I know you probably will try real hard not to swallow that thing. And hell, maybe your windpipe’s freezin’ up and you can’t. I secretly hope you just choke on it and save us all a whole mess of trouble. But I have a feelin’ you just won’t go down that easy. Besides, I think it’s Aster’s job to finish you. She’ll probably do a heck of a job at it too. Heard a girl screaming somethin’ awful out there just a little while ago. Dyin’ lungs don’t scream that loud, but angry ones do.”
The tainted strawberry began to macerate in her mouth, leaking its herbal juices across her tongue and down her throat, which just managed to swallow with what little muscular movement she had left.
The muscles in her face and body began to twist and contract. The pain of the transformation was worlds worse this time, but her immobilized diaphragm made it impossible for her to scream. Her arms rose involuntarily and began to shake as the bodily metamorphosis took hold. The fingers bent and twisted at the joints, becoming knobby and gnarled and drained of their stolen mocha color. The only brown remaining now was in the form of mottled liver spots and moles. They were the hands of her mother and sister. Reversing the potion that had made her into Ivy’s twin was robbing her of old form, as she had known it would.
Her spine hunched forward, making the characteristic Stargazer hump. The bones in her legs shortened and thickened, the flesh bubbling up into pustules that would painfully swell and weep in the hot summer months. Two of the sickle vines snapped at the widest part of her calf, but others slithered in to their rescue.
After a few more shuddering twists and cramps, the potion finished its work, and Oleander’s spirit sunk back into its spoiled new body, like parasite to host.
“Ooh boy, you are even nastier lookin’ than me, and that’s saying somethin’.”
I will kill you, and oh I will enjoy it, thought Oleander.
“Now, I’ve been thinkin’ about what to do with you. Aster might be on her way back here, but I think she’s headin’ north to that spot in the woods we all know and love. What do you say we meet her up there?”
All Oleander could do was grunt. Pick your place, bitch. You’ll die either way.
When Iris cut the sickle vines free in order to move her, Oleander would have smiled if she’d been able. The bitch had just made the last mistake of her life.
-26-
Aster wasn’t sure how long she sat on the burial mound steps with Bryon’s head in her lap, but by the time she found the strength to stand up, his blood had dried into cold and tacky goo on her hands and the slate steps. The moon had risen higher into the sky, illuminating the way down.
She couldn’t leave him here, but what could she do? He was too heavy to carry by herself. She would have to call someone for help, someone who could explain to Bryon’s poor father that his son was dead. At least for tonight, until she could look Nick in the eye and tell him that this was all her fault. The thought made her want to throw herself the rest o
f the way down the murdering stone steps.
You told Bryon’s father that you weren’t in any kind of trouble. What a lie that was. She looked down at Bryon. He’d tried so hard to come back to her, but he may have been lost anyway. She would never know from his final words.
“I’m so sorry.” A tear trickled down her cheek, but she wiped it away impatiently.
Sheriff Kennedy said he would help her if she ever called on him, and now was the time to do that. Someone would come collect poor Bryon, and once all this madness was over, she would face the consequences.
After arranging Bryon’s clothes in the dignified manner he deserved, she headed back up to her shorts.
Their picnic area was a shambles, but the flowers Bryon had picked for her still sat in their small vase. “Asters for Aster,” she whispered. Fresh tears welled up again, and she fought the urge to sit back down and cry some more. But she needed to get going; she’d already been lucky to avoid any witnesses, and the hour was growing late.
She spared one more glance at Bryon’s body on her way back down, thankful his face was hidden. “I love you,” she whispered and headed toward his car.
A quick check revealed the keys were still dangling from the ignition. The thought of driving it filled her with dread, but she didn’t have much choice.
She climbed in and situated herself behind the wheel. Her legs barely reached the pedals. She was sure she’d seen Bryon move this seat once, but she didn’t know how to move it herself, so she just sat forward. She’d observed the practice of driving enough to get the basic idea of how it worked.
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